CDN has learned from two sources that Mike Ansley has been promoted to vice president of sales for Cisco Canada. Ansley, the former Channel Chief, will not be responsible for all the subsidiary’s sales.

Just last July Ansley was appointed to vice president of business markets for Cisco Canada. One source said that Ansley was doing such a tremendous job the company asked him to take on more.

Ansley has had previous experience handling multiple roles at Cisco. As Channel Chief he handling three areas for networking giant.

During his time as Channel Chief Ansley was instrumental in implementing channel programs such as the EASE program or Enabling Architecture Sales Excellence and the Master Cloud Builder program. Ansley told CDN at the time that people resources are a huge challenge especially in going after small to mid-size business.

What Ansley will be most known for is establishing the Partner Led business approach at Cisco Canada. Cisco at the time had a touch balancing act with partner and customer led directions. Under Ansley he put a strong emphasis on Partner Led starting in early 2012 and today many more channel partners are financially motivated to work with Cisco. What Ansley and the entire Cisco channel team did was remodel its approach to business with a focus on funding Partner-led activities so that solution providers can go it alone. He also promoted Rebecca Leach and put her in charge of the Partner-Led program so that it had a dedicated leader in Canada.

Ansley’s promotion comes at a time when Cisco Canada extended application-centric infrastructure (ACI) to access and wide area networks that will attempt to increasing network automation and IT agility for customers.

Cisco also expanded application policy infrastructure controller (APIC) to unify network automation and management across the data centre and the enterprise network.

Cisco Canada is planning on hosting several channel partners next week in Puerto Rico to show them data centre innovation.